Re: config files proposal

[Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>]

antonio_duran@hotmail.com (Antonio Duran) writes:

> Form my point of view, in some cases it could be necessary/interesting
> to keep configuration information confidential and to provide the
> means to check the integrity of a configuration file.

I'm not clear what you mean by "confidential". Clearly, the
application program that uses the config file must be able to read it.

If you mean that no other process/person should be able to read it,
that would be up to the operating system. If the OS provides access
controls to files, you can enforce confidentiality.

I think that issue has to be outside the scope of the Config_Files
API, since it depends heavily on the OS, and we want the Config_Files
API to be OS independent.


As for checking the integrity of the config file, that could be done
with an XML DTD and a validating parser. Come to think of it, that is
an advantage of using XML that I had not considered. Although, a
non-XML parser could also check integrity to the same degree.

Hmm. I'm not clear what you mean by "integrity". XML DTD's allow
specifying what values must be present, and to some extent what type
they are.

In other situations, "integrity" might mean a version control revision
number, or a checksum, or something similar.

-- 
-- Stephe